Well, maybe. The North Koreans are as renowned for their honesty and their transparency as the Harris/Biden team, so it’s entirely possible this thing is made out of cardboard. Still, attention should be paid, and attention should be paid to development of a new American ICBM. The US land-based ICBMs are based on a design pushing *sixty* years old. Design something new… and road-mobile. Build a thousand of the missiles, and five thousand decoys.
Boy this sure sounds familiar… sounds like “cold fusion” and “hafnium isomers” got trashed on bathtub hooch at an office party, hooked up in the supply closet and had an ugly baby.
That sounds like good news. One issue, however:
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has approved the design of a new kind of reactor, known as a small modular reactor (SMR). The design, from the Portland, Ore.–based company NuScale Power, is intended to speed construction, lower cost and improve safety over traditional nuclear reactors…
Portland? OREGON?!?!
Anyway, it’s a 50 megawatt design, able to be built in clusters to gin up to 600 megawatts. A company exec is quoted as saying they think they can sell up to 1,682 of the reactors by 2042… which sounds like a lot, but it would still only produce around 82% as much energy as the current set of larger reactors. Of course if hundreds of small reactors start coming online producing cheap, safe, reliable and carbon-free electricity, one imagines that larger reactors will also start coming along. Ideally, thorium and breeder reactors will also *finally* enter production. Additionally, a very large number of reactors should require a large number of a new generation of nuclear scientists, engineers and technicians… *exactly* the people you need to develope even more advanced nuclear power systems, including fusion systems. You certainly won’t advance the cause of civilized humanity by hiring THESE idjits.
Looks like the first unit will be sold to power Utah, but will be located in Idaho. I still think that the Great Salt Lake would be a fantastic place for a few hundred of these things.
Old nuclear test films upscaled and colorized. While not perfect, they’re really quite good.
These come from a YouTube channel with a lot of old B&W films “improved” via artificial intelligence:
A while back I found two 8X10 glossies in an antique store. The owners had no information on the photos; they had come in a box of photos from an estate sale, the rest of the photos being completely unrelated. The store owners thought that the photos showed a test of a beam weapon of some kind. Not unreasonable for people not familiar with actual beam weapons or ballistic missiles. The photos are certainly evocative of death beams zapping targets in the sky. But what they actually show are missile warheads coming *down,* screaming towards the ground at incredible speed. When the photos were taken, I’ve no idea. *Where,* almost certainly somewhere in the South Pacific… most likely Kwajalein Atoll, a common target for ICBMs and SLBMs. *What* missile was tested, I’m also uncertain. One photo shows a single re-entry vehicle; the other shows three. The Minuteman III lobbed three warheads; the Peacekeeper, up to ten; the Trident, up to 14. This *probably* shows a Minuteman III… assuming that is actually a single test.
I’ve uploaded the full resolution scans of these photos to the 2020-09 APR Extras Dropbox folder for Patrons and Subscribers at the $4 level and above.
Late 1970’s depictions of “realistic” starships as understood at the time. These include an Orion vehicle (which, despite claims to the contrary, would make a terrible starship, since the specific impulse of a reasonably conceivable Orion is an order of magnitude or two too low for practical interstellar craft), two Bussard ramjets, and a “golden globe” minimum weight starship proposed by Robert L. Forward, whose operating principles I am currently a bit fuzzy on.
Bussard ramjets would use magnetic fields to collect interstellar hydrogen. The hydrogen would be compressed in a fusion reactor, preferably a steady-state one, and used to provide thrust to the starship. For a number of years this concept promised great things, but in recent decades it has been pretty much discounted. On one hand, the magnetic fields are not very likely going to work well at a reasonable mass, and they tend to not form open-mouthed funnels, but rather closed-mouthed “cups,” thus preventing the hydrogen from getting into the engine. Whoops. Second, thrust is unlikely to exceed drag much above maybe a percent or two of lightspeed, meaning a Bussard ramjet might serve as a decent “anchor” or drag brake, but not as an accelerator to relativistic velocities.
I’m currently running a sale on downloadable aerospace items that I had planned on either not releasing or not releasing yet. Twenty-eight pretty nifty items of considerable interest to aerospace aficionados. The sale is open to APR Patrons and Monthly Historical Documents Program subscribers for one week only. If any of these look interesting, consider signing up.
One of the main purposes of the Monthly Historical Documents Program/APR Patreon is to get rare aerospace items from eBay. These items are then made available to subscribers/patrons via monthly votes and catalogs.
Below are some of the items I’ve recently paid for (though not as yet received). If you are interested in getting high-rez scans and/or helping me save these sort of things for future generations (as well as keeping my cats in food and litter), please consider signing up for the Monthly Historical Documents Program or the APR Patreon.
If you want Blammo, it’s hard to beat an H-Bomb.
For decades it has been the vogue to complain about the dropping of two atom bombs on the Empire of Japan. This has been argued ad nauseum, but I think a good summary of the better position is found in:
Written by Paul Fussel in 1981. He was an infantryman in Europe during WWII, and likely would have been killed – along with perhaps a million other American soldiers, sailors and airmen – had the A-bombs not been dropped.
The future scholar-critic who writes The History of Canting in the Twentieth Century will find much to study and interpret in the utterances of those who dilate on the special wickedness of the A-bomb-droppers. He will realize that such utterance can perform for the speaker a valuable double function. First, it can display the fineness of his moral weave. And second, by implication it can also inform the audience that during the war he was not socially so unfortunate as to find himself down there with the ground forces, where he might have had to compromise the purity and clarity of his moral system by the experience of weighing his own life against someone else’s. Down there, which is where the other people were, is the place where coarse self-interest is the rule. When the young soldier with the wild eyes comes at you, firing, do you shoot him in the foot, hoping he’ll be hurt badly enough to drop or mis-aim the gun with which he’s going to kill you, or do you shoot him in the chest (or, if you’re a prime shot, in the head) and make certain that you and not he will be the survivor of that mortal moment?
It’s very definitely worth reading.